10 October 1987
Abigail Mead is a pseudonym of Vivian Kubrick, daughter of Stanley and composer of the original music in Full Metal Jacket. As the name of R. Lee Ermey, the real-life drill instructor who played the same role in the movie, isn’t featured on the credits I’ll take an educated guess that Nigel Goulding is who you hear on this track instead. ‘I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor’ recycles whatever few lines from those drilling scenes don’t have the racial and sexual insults that this shallow, smirking movie sneakily loves. This leaves us with a chant-along recruitment drive for joining the US Marines and dying in war, set to an old-school hip-hop beat and hard rock guitar, making this somebody’s idea of a rap.
Of all the pop-cultural hits of the mid-’80s that relished and glamourised US military action, such as Paul Hardcastle’s ’19’ and Status Quo’s ‘In The Army Now’, this is the worst, cheapest and most moronic. If you like this, I can think of quite a few things that should be shouted at you.
